There was a click of the door opening. A children's coach entered the hall, smiling and winking at the budding athletes. The man was about forty years old, of medium height, with a short haircut, muscular and trim. Apparently a former athlete. Gathering the kids around him, the man introduced himself. His name was Mr Petrie. To be honest, he didn't really like it when the kids addressed him so formally, but there was nothing to be done. Rules are rules.
During the first lessons it was hard to organise the kids so that they obediently followed all the commands of their new coach exactly as intended. Therefore, just like the others, the first physical education lessons were only of an introductory nature, rather than any benefit for the young organism. Having spread out gymnastic mats on the ground, teachers tried to show the group basic warm-up exercises, which the latter were reluctant to perform. The kids were constantly distracted by extraneous objects and classmates, laughing and wiggling without stopping.
In the middle of the session, Mr Petrie removed all the extra balls from the playground and, leaving only one, started to encourage the children to play football with him, passing to each of them in turn. Some reacted to this gesture in a sporting way – kicking the ball away from themselves in the opposite direction, others fell to their knees, trying to take the round toy for themselves and run away from the man, and others did not pay any attention to this unknown game for them. Ted belonged to the third group of children. When the turn came to him, and a miniature football slightly hit his foot, he looked at it perplexedly and turned around and went the other way, as if avoiding repeated contact with it.
The coach was not upset by the fact that not everyone in this hall was interested in sports games. Firstly, he realised that they were still very young children. Secondly, not everyone is destined to become a professional athlete in the future. Most of all, Mr Petrie was surprised by a situation that happened to Theodore a year and a half later, when he was already a second-year student at the CEC. It was this situation that predetermined Ted's further enrolment in a sports school.